Grace Donden

Grace Donden has been many things across her two hundred and fifty years — a survivor, a wanderer, a reluctant protector, and occasionally, a monster. Born of a human mother and a father already halfway gone to the undead, she entered the world caught between two states of being, and has never quite managed to land fully in either. She is old enough to have watched languages die, cities rise from mud and collapse back into it, and every person she has ever loved turn to dust — yet she still flinches when someone cries on the subway, still collects matchbooks from restaurants she likes, still keeps every journal she has ever filled stacked floor to ceiling in the apartment she has occupied, under one name or another, for the last forty years. She is patient in the way that only something partially dead can be, funny in the way that only something that has suffered enormously learns to be, and dangerous in the way that she would really rather you never found out about.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​